There are powerful arguments on either side of the so-called 'Nature versus Nurture' controversy, but if you will allow me I will by way of introduction first outline briefly the reason why I have suddenly introduced the subject of inherited predisposition. Note that I write: 'inherited predisposition' meaning a disposition in advance to react in particular ways, and not in the sense of a 'preconceived belief' or an idea or opinion formed beforehand.

              FIRST OF ALL – WHY INTRODUCE THE SUBJECT ANYWAY?

I have come to realise that in order for my theory of eliminative determinism to be wholly unified and balanced, the concatenational influences of both nature and nurture need to be reconciled and harmonised into a perspective which unites, merges or incorporates both nature and nurture into an exclusive causal model.

     I have now formed the opinion that the whole traditional notion of 'nature versus nurture' is flawed, and that in fact both deterministic phenomena are really manifestations of the same outcomes, or different sides of the same deterministic causal coin – as discovered and observable in the behaviour of the natural, living, deterministically nurtured human being.

     I also have a feeling that the whole subject of nature versus nurture, like the various amusing and curious adaptations of Heideggerianism which is applied as a philosophically faded palimpsest or indistinct template to the most absurd domains of the human experience, is to a large extent hyped-up by those academics who deliberately engender the contrived polarisation of the disputation if they have a book to write or sell, or an ontological axe to grind, or who wish to draw attention to themselves for reasons of academic preferment.

     For me the so-called 'divide' between the two types of deterministic physical influence is a myth. When, incidentally, I say 'physical influences' I really mean by that the two different sets of causal objects which characterise on the one hand the intrinsic influential genes, [the dna] and on the other - the extrinsic influential human and other causal objects which we encounter in life, which bring about our experiential, predispositionally moderated change after we are born.

     What I am suggesting I suppose is that much of that which makes us human - our predisposition or propensity to love, acquire language and to integrate in the family, group or society is also deterministically prone to concatenational influences, some of which can be perceived by men in women as innate glitches and vice versa in that they are considered dysfunctional in relation to society as a whole - the religious are a prime example [see twin towers and general world history.] I believe on average women are more ready to believe in the existence of ghosts, astrology, luck, God, angels and non-existent dualisms. etc. I believe that it was men that assumed the vast majority of the positions as priests and shamans, to the exclusion of women as part and parcel of the same fact that there was little or no opportunity for females to be educated and given a chance in those fields. Now that things have changed in this regard, women can’t wait to don the priestly robes and start to lead the congregations in their meaningless chants and supervise the ritualistic ingestion of ‘Christ's blood and flesh.
They float around the altar like expert gourmets in a macabre let's pretend version of a cannibal feast, or new food-product marketing 'taster girls' in your local shopping mall, who tempt passers-by with small gobbets of processed ham or thimblefuls of French over-oaked wine.

     Thus do 'we that apprehend' have to share the world with such cognitively afflicted and encephalonically imprinted fellow human beings, and suffer the disruption, evil, wars and general unhappiness that is part and parcel of what happens in connection with, or as a concomitant of such neurological damage and lack of ontological discrimination., It is the non-Jesuitical cross that atheists have to bear.

                     NATURE AND NURTURE – WHAT’S THE DIFFERENCE?

In saying this I am not claiming that the development of the individual human is WHOLLY due to genetically determined factors, nor am I claiming that we arrive in this world with our brains in the condition of a blank slate or tabula rasa, but rather that the whole concept of an unnatural dichotomy twixt nature and nurture is a total misconception. Try as I may I cannot provide one - even ONE - example of ANY single current or historical event that is planned and enacted by an individual, that is NOT wholly antecedally determined by the totally unified and combined concatenational causal influences of both genealogical nature, and that of familial and societal nurture within the communalism of the particular human group.

     Later I shall attempt to provide circumstantial evidence that the human genetical program not only encodes physical information pertaining to the colour of our eyes, our hair, our sex, our racial characteristics etc. but also includes data which deterministically predisposes us as to whether or not we will respond to certain neurological cognitive stimuli or reject it, or consign it to neurologic limbo of the 'pending' category.

     Before dealing with my contention that the human DNA provides a unique potential for certain neurological behavioural modalities in response to various experiential circumstances, I offer this simple illustration, which I believe confirms the fact of a genetically antecedally determined physical potentiality for certain bodily development, which is associated with, and is to a large extent dependent upon the natural deterministically shaped life experience of the human concerned.

A. Every  cosmic  entity   is  a  causal  object.
B. Every  event is caused by a causal  object.
C. Therefore  every  human  is causal  object.
D. Events couldn't  have happened otherwise.
E. Objects  couldn't  have  existed  differently
F.  Abstractions Cause and Effect do not exist

     When I was a boy I lived in a poor neighbourhood. In the same street was a man and wife with eight children. Five of them were boys. Due to the poverty of the children and the lack of any education of the part of the parents, the children were all malnourished and stunted in growth. As they grew they remained small in comparison with all the other kids in the street. They continued this way into teenhood and early adulthood – EXCEPT for one.

     Known locally as 'titch,' Sammy was the smallest of the bunch, but when he reached the age of seventeen and a half he joined the army. I myself was in the army at the time and was posted to Egypt. When after a long period, I returned to my Liverpool home I met Sammy, who was also on leave, in the street. To my utter amazement he was bigger than I was. When I remarked upon it, he said that the army dietician attached to the battalion had recommended a certain food regime, and he had begun to put on his extra height almost immediately. When he later spoke to his parents, they too made the necessary simple alterations to the family eating habits and all of the kids then started to gain height - EXCEPT for two of them who never gained in height at all, both of whom had by then left home at a young age. One the eldest boy lived alone in a flat cooking himself the same sort of meals that he had grown up eating, and the other, an older girl who married and continued to visit upon her new husband the mother's originally nutrient deficient dietary disaster.

     For me this illustrated the link between the deterministically provided potential furnished by nature upon those causal objects concerned to attain a genetically and antecedally ascertained certain height, IF they were realised and experientially nurtured with the required protein and vitamins to realise this intrinsic, genetically determined potential.

     If nature alters or juggles the genetical sequence of the DNA a little bit it can turn a hare-brained hare into a Homo sapiens with brain volume of at least 1400 cc.
A little additional tweak can turn a homo sapiens into a homosexual. It is a matter of DNA sequence-order - genes come in various patterns. After we are born nature nutritionally switches the same genes on and off in different patterns depending upon the addition or absence of certain substances that can be metabolised by the organism to give energy and build tissue whereby the stunted kid is metamorphosed into a strapping, six foot soldier.

     Genetical switching is executed by 'promoters' - small rung-areas of the elongated, spiralling ladder of deoxyribonucleic acid, Humans have hundreds of these 'facilitators' which chemically enable the required genes into the procedures which lead to the production of the particular nitrogenous organic compounds that are essential constituents of living cells. After a suitable period, when the necessary organic changes have had time to work, a promoter will close down the gene once more.

     Thus eliminative determinism is not a project of simply substituting one arcane intangible or spirituous entity with another equally mysterious tangible or physical entity. There is nothing mysterious about the human body - YOU ARE ONE! - You can shake hands with another body if you wish - kiss another - or push one you do not like off a cliff.

                         THE MEATY SAPIENT COMPOSITE THAT IS MAN.

So, if we eliminative determinists insist that all humans come into this world with many similar evolutionary inherited predispositions and abilities, and some distinctive, individual and unique ones, which come from our evolutionary past - what are they and where are they located?

     That is an easy one to answer - just go and look in a mirror. The meaty sapient composite that stares back at you is the embodiment of all that is you. The reflection in the mirror is a composite of all the deterministic genetical enablers that protect and promote your bodily and neuro-physical change, repair and modification. It houses the ever-changing vital organs of the bodily system that keeps your re-oxygenated blood flowing in order that your bodily tissue is kept alive. Beneath the skull, enwrapped in the bloodied serpentine coils of the patterned and co-ordinated meatiness of your brain lies the deterministically assembled neurons, which exist in re-accessible and re-configurable combinations of genetically inherited predispositional behaviour templates, evolved by the process of natural selection to respond to the other ideating objects [other humans] they encounter in certain antecedally engendered modes.

     My belief is that we are born into this world either WITH or WITHOUT certain systemic neural capacities, and that there are some who are congenitally incapable of resisting and throwing-off or overcoming the effects of the transcendentalist indoctrination they are exposed to with their mother's milk in early life. The result is that certain centres of the neurological reticule are utterly and permanently damaged in the handling of questions of ontological understanding. One of the most difficult concepts for the dysfunctionally religious and the transcendentalist brain to comprehend [a defectiveness I have long believed has a genetical origin associated with the transmission and defective copying of genetic information] is the inability to grasp the fact that nullificatory terms like ‘nothing or nothingness' are utterly meaningless. They are genuinely unable to perceive the lack of "Klarheit der Darstellung" when they speak of 'Nothing.'

They speak of 'nothing' as a 'cognitive tool' with which to contrast and compare 'something,' without comprehending that they are dealing with an uncontrastable and incomparable non-spanner in the non-ontological non-ontic works.

     My remarks and observations were neither based upon the outlandish idea that people are born into the world with ready-made preconceived ideas or beliefs, nor with neuro-physical equivalent of phrenological belief bumps. My assertion is not that 'human nature' exists as some sort of spirituous abstractional sprite – I DO NOT believe that it exists at all – what I believe exists are natural humans who are born into this world pre-programmed to respond pre-deterministically to certain stimuli and that this behaviour is an extremely sophisticated version of what we refer to in the animal world as 'instinct.'

     My point is that each person born into the world arrives from the womb with a genetically engendered complex of predispositional emotional and intellectual attributes that determine a person's characteristic actions and reactions which predisposes them to think and act in certain ways if they are subjected or exposed or deprived to/of certain situations and ideas. I am not claiming, as I made clear at the outset that a person’s attitudes and behaviours are not influenced by the effects of the social and natural environment, or that our experience of the world does not change or effect these predispositional states, but merely that we are more inclined, disposed or susceptible to yielding readily to or resisting certain situations.

     A lesbian women might decide to resist the sexual advances of a man for example. A gay man might feel uncomfortable behaviourally if he perceives signs of sexual interest being shown towards him by a woman friend etc. Genetical coding does not have teleological purposes, no more than the letters of the English alphabet exist in modalities of 'meaningfulness' – it is the humans for whom the genetical codes are blueprints that consider themselves to have 'purpose,' and the purposeful, meaning, knowing humans who use the letters of the alphabet to communicate who exist in modes of neurological 'meaning or knowing' – though 'purpose, meaning' and 'knowing' are just abstractions which do not exist – and as for the genes and the ink letters, they are just insensate lumps of chemical too.


     Examples? OK. First of all some obvious ones. Do you agree that all mentally disabled people are born into this world with a genetically damaged 'neural hardware' engendered neural capacities which are often seriously damaged? is now, one would have thought, Nowadays anyone who chose to argue that the behavioural features of Down's Syndrome could be put down to fosterage or prenatal uterine damage, as they have been in the past

     Going back to my old discussions years ago with philosopher Jon Neivens concerning Chomsky and his notions regarding 'innate language.'
Whilst I did not agree at the time that babies are born with an instinctual understanding of the rudiments of syntax and grammar, I would be a fool if I did not concede that human young do have an awe-inspiring ability to absorb the rhythms and structure of language and to build vocabularies at a very early age. This I conclude must be a genetical predisposition, and that we are all born with a natural ability to use language. After raising eight children there is no doubt in my mind that babies appear to have distinct preferences and characters from birth well before they are exposed to the vicissitudes of sibling configuration or other such sudden or unexpected changes or shifts often encountered in one's life, activities, or surroundings.

     I have mentioned many times before that when I employ useful shortcuts like 'religion,' or: 'the medical establishment' and suchlike, it is in order that I can avoid typing out the necessary circumlocution such as: 'religious people who are members of an established church,' or 'the majority of doctors who can be said to represent to majority opinion on medical matters,' etc. I still believe that the acquiescence of the non-aggressive religious folk adds deterministically and exponentially to the overall evil, even though they take no actual physical part in the murder and mayhem. A similar situation happened in Nazi Germany where a large part of the population stood silently by, whilst 6-million Europeans were exterminated by the party they had voted into power.

     Lastly, Gill Norman in a review of Matt Ridley’s lecture given as part of the first Newcastle Science Festival, International Centre for Life, 14 April 2003. draws our attention to the trials carried out by Susan Mineka and colleagues, which provides a neat illustration of Seligman’s preparedness theory whereby a predisposition to a particular behaviour is mediated by a particular experience...

References:
[1] Ridley, Matt 2003. Nature via Nurture: Genes, Experience and What Makes us Human by Matt Ridley. Fourth Estate, 2003; ISBN 1-84115-745-7.
[2] Lloyd, Nikolas. 'Someone's at home - This is good.'
http://www.thegreatdebate.org.uk/GDBlankLloyd1.html
[3] Norman, Gill. Review of Matt Ridley’s lecture given as part of the first Newcastle Science Festival, International Centre for Life, 14 April 2003.

Matt Ridley did research in zoology at Oxford before becoming a journalist. He worked for The Economist for eight years and has been a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph and Daily Telegraph since 1993. He is author of Nature Via Nurture (2003), Genome (1999), The Origins of Virtue (1996) and The Red Queen : Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature (1993). He is chairman of the International Centre for Life, Newcastle upon Tyne's science park and visitor centre devoted to life science.

Matt Ridley was on the panel at Determined to Survive? The Great Debate - Freedom, Determinism and the Gene in June 2000.

Gill Norman has a BA in Psychology & Philosophy and a PhD in Psychology. Before joining CRD as a reviewer she worked at the University of Durham.

Email: gn5@york.ac.uk

Tel: 01904 321075    Fax: 01904 32104